Sometimes a reader just doesn't connect with certain writers. That appears to be the case for me here.

As I started this book I had a sense of familiarity, but it wasn't so strong that I immediately recognized where it was from. A little further in and it dawned on me that this was a follow-up to a book I had read previously (no ... I don't always know when I'm reading a sequel as books are sent to my kindle and I generally read them in the order that they are put there). I looked back to see that I had indeed read and reviewed the first book and had given it a very mid-range rating. This actually made me more determined to give this a really careful read, so I started it over to really absorb what I was reading.

And still this didn't click with me.

Tough, female biker, Hob Ravani, is back, defending her distant planet from the mega-corporation TransRift Inc. TransRift has a monopoly on just about everything that anyone could need or want on the entire planet, but Hob and her 'Ghost Wolves' are a thorn in their sides. TransRift is trying to mine a strange blue mineral from Tanegawa's World - the mineral is the source of power that allows for interstellar travel by tearing holes in space and time. Only 'Weathermen' are able to make this work, but the mineral is the source of all the power. TransRift will tear the planet apart to mine this mineral in order to control this very needed substance, which would give TransRift control over the majority of <em>all</em> interstellar travel.

Only Hob and her associates can possibly stop this profit-hungry corporation.

The idea here is great, even if making corporate greed the motivating factor isn't particularly original. My problem with the book (as it was the first time around) is simply that I didn't care. Hob as a character doesn't appeal to me. I understand her anti-hero hero-ness, but I simply don't connect with her and I just don't care what happens to her or to this world. The future of the planet - essentially owned by the 'evil' TransRift - hinges on our care for Hob and her friends.

The writing isn't bad - it just didn't connect with me and I'll look for something a little different.

Looking for a good book? <em>Blood Binds the Pack</em> by Alex Wells is a follow-up to <em>Hunger Makes the Wolf</em>. If you enjoyed the first in the series, this will be just as good. If you didn't enjoy the first, this doesn't offer any redemption and this is not recommended for new readers to the series.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

I didn't realize initially that Blood Binds the Pack was the second in a series. I have read a short story by Wells, and that was what interested me in this title. I will have to read the first one, I think, before I understand this story. But I'm excited to see what Wells does in the future.

I received a free ARC from NetGalley.

This is awesome! The point of view is from two brothers and two female cousins. The slow build of the mysterious powers and conflict between uber corporation, oppressed employees, and bandits makes this a tense fight for survival. At almost 500 pages, this is an engrossing science fiction novel that packs multiple punches. Expect characters to die.

The suspense is very well done. Chapter titles show a countdown of days. The weathermen are scary. The corporate people intelligent. The enforcers (greenbellies) are hateful bullies and murderers. The superpowers are unknown and that makes them scary, even the people that have them are afraid of using them. The cousins each have love interests, one being lesbian.

An ending that will keep me coming back for another read. I would read more!

Really fantastic book, and a lot of intense fun.

To me, what really shines in this book, as in the last one, are the human stories. Yes, this is a story with some excellent worldbuilding, but when it comes right down to it, this is a unionizing story that we've seen play out many different ways in many different places. I love seeing that taken to a crazy badass planet where all the variables might change, but people are still people, and we care about them. Deeply.

This book is the sequel to Hunger Makes the Wolf and I devoured them both in no time. I loved this series so much I didn't even stop to take notes as I read. I'm already making a list of people I can gift it to.

Tanegawa's World is a desert planet owned by a large corporation called TransRift. The primary industry is mining. It's a harsh life for the residents, who are at the corporation's mercy for the necessities of life. The Unions are essential in making sure safety standards are met and workers are properly paid. Even then, it is a desperate kind of power and weak in the face of the corporation's control. Little is done to aid those blacklisted by the company, some of whom end up joining gangs of bandits and mercenaries.

The Ghost Wolves are one such gang of mercenaries. This tight-knit group of bikers take what jobs they can to eke out a living and stick it to the company wherever possible. Of these reprobates, Hob Ravani is on the bottom rung. Taken in by the head of the Ghost Wolves, she accidentally betrayed the gang and now must prove her worth once more. She is given that chance when she finds Ol' Nick's brother shot dead in the desert.

The series has a Western flavour to it, but subverts some of the more problematic tropes and trends of the genre. The cast is diverse, featuring a host of PoC characters. Same-sex relationships are normalised. There's even some disability representation, with both Hob and Nick Ravani missing an eye each... though I concede the series could have benefited from more representation in this area.

The Lone Gunman is a trope that gets short shrift; everything about the series emphasises collective power. This is particularly the case in Blood Binds the Pack, where the Union comes into more direct opposition with the company. However, it can be seen in numerous other ways. The Ghost Wolves rely on teamwork for survival; bad things happen when a member goes out solo. But it goes beyond survival. There's a strong found-family vibe to the mercenary gang.

It also plays into Hob's friendship with Mags, Ol' Nick's niece. It was so delightful to see such a strong female friendship on the page. It's not without its bumps--Hob, particularly, makes mistakes that strain things. But they never give up on each other, and as the women rise in influence their friendship has an impact on the communities around them. It was also a joy to see a friendship between such different women. In many ways, they are opposites, but they hold true to each other.

In addition to the Western genre, science fiction and fantasy are also blended in. There's something mysterious about Tanegawa's World that causes electronics to fritz and encourages the development of strange powers in certain members of the community. The elemental magic was one of my favourite parts of the story. Hob's fire manifests in fairly traditional ways: she lights cigarettes with the snap of her fingers and throws the occasional fireball. However, other powers manifest in some different and creative ways. The Bone Collector is particularly fascinating, turning to stone at will and moving through the sand. His relationship with Hob is fascinating and continuing readers may be delighted to hear he gets more time in the spotlight throughout Blood Binds the Pack. The latter book also has an instance of Air magic that manages to be a fascinating and powerful piece of representation.

The story is told in third person, predominantly focused Hob and Mags, though we also hear from certain Wolves and pick up more characters along the way. The changes in voice between perspectives are subtle, but effective. The pacing also works well, interspersing some wonderful moments of connection between the characters in amongst the action. Hunger Makes the Wolf comes to a dramatic and satisfying conclusion. Blood Binds the Pack manages to increase the stakes and the tension through an effective countdown at the start of (and sometimes within) each chapter.

All in all, Hunger Makes the Wolf and Blood Binds the Pack form an addictive duology that has become a new favourite.

There is a distinctive sensation I get from visiting Tanegawa’s World, the planet where Alex Wells’ Hob Ravani novels are set – like walking against the wind, sand grinding between my teeth. It’s a pitiless, unrelenting tableau of salt and grit and thirst, and, like the best planets, its inhabitants are at the mercy of its disposition. It shapes your body, colonizes your mind. So much of the conflict in Blood Binds the Pack (and its predecessor, Hunger Makes the Wolf) is generated by need to control or be consumed by what radiates through the rock and soil of Tanegawa’s World and the power it possesses to capacitate or to corrupt, that the novel ends up being much more than the raucous sci-fi western it advertises itself to be. It’s the kind of worldbuilding that earns its own subgenre classification – geopunk, maybe? (I know the “punk” suffix gets overused a lot in delineating genre fiction, but if ever a series deserved to be punkified, I think “space witch mercenary biker gang” is it.)
I went into Blood Binds the Pack a little tentatively; sequels are tricky buggers that often try to side-step the anxiety principle by aiming to please rather than supersede. Thankfully, Wells doesn’t recoil in the face of expectation – they seem more inclined to give it the finger. Blood Binds the Pack does not follow Hunger Makes the Wolf so much as challenge it to a wrestling match and show up with a game plan for victory. Yes, there is more action, higher stakes, a faster pace – but more than that, Wells levels up their skills across the board. Character moments are deeper and fleshier, and the culture and lifestyle of the miners on Tanegawa’s World is more deftly explored. Themes that matter to Wells, particularly labor rights, are emphasized with greater breadth and clarity.
Blood Binds the Pack picks up not long after the end of Hunger Makes the Wolf. Despite suffering setbacks at the hands of Hob Ravani’s Ghost Wolves, the TransRift corporation made further strides to consolidate their hold over the Interstellar government and erode citizen rights, using as leverage their monopoly over the Weathermen, inhumanly powered beings that make faster than light travel possible. Now that TransRift has discovered the source of the Weathermen’s power – the mineral amritite – they hatch a scheme to turn the miners on Tanegawa’s World into little more than indentured slaves to obtain it.
Hob is still the central figure in Blood Binds the Pack, but her adopted sister Mag (who spent much of Hunger Make the Wolf as a prisoner of TransRift) has a larger and more proactive roll. While Hob and the Ghost Wolves look to swipe the source of TransRift’s power out from under them, it’s up to Mag to organize the various mining towns into a unified front against TransRift’s brutal disregard for their rights and safety. This storyline forms the moral centerpiece of the novel – essentially, the reason the Ghost Wolves have been transformed from a muscle for hire outfit to an activist militia. That’s why it’s a little disappointing that Mag should bear the most morally questionable choice in the novel, one involving a TransRift collaborator: a choice that still doesn’t sit right with me and a problem that I feel Wells fails to adequately address.
For better or worse, though, Tanegawa’s World isn’t the kind of place where you spend a lot of time and energy second guessing yourself. It’s a place where you take action or suffer the consequences. It’s a world that somehow ended up with the heroes it deserves, as if something deep in its core pushed them into coughing up what it needed from them. Blood Binds the Pack is framed, ingeniously, around a countdown to the day when its final conflict comes to a head. Full-blown rapture is pretty much the only road this story could have travelled down, and Wells, who writes like they’ve never met bear they didn’t want to poke, has their hands firmly on the wheel.

In some ways I enjoyed this book as much, if not more, than the first in the series, but there are still some unanswered questions. Great characters, intense action, with some existential and philosophical musings in between. Hope it's not too long before the third book.

Tanegawa is a planet under TransRift Inc's tight control, and no one is going to challenge their authority. At this very moment they are searching for the source of power which enables their modified human horrors, the Weathermen, to make interstellar travel possible. The company has no interest in the future of the planet, let alone their exploited miners who toil to generate the company's wealth.
But they haven't banked on Hob Ravani and her rag tag band of misfits, the Ghost Wolves, who have become part of the growing resistance. Along with her 'sister' Mag's miner collective, the planet is ready for a major battle between the oppressors and the oppressed.
As Shige Rollins returns to the planet with the most advanced model of Weatherman, Mr Yellow, things are about to get very complicated.
Blood Binds the Pack is the type of sequel where you wish you had read the first novel, Hunger Makes the Wolf. This is not because Blood Binds the Pack doesn't work well as a standalone book, but more because you feel you've missed out on another damn good read.
This is the type of world viewers of Deadwood or Firefly would find familiar, both in terms of frontier towns, the people inhabiting them, and the chosen few who live privileged lives, cossetted by every convenience advanced technology has to offer.
The book has a solid plot, but running through the whole narrative is an excellent cast of fully developed characters. Alex Wells has taken stereotypes from westerns and high-action sci-fi thrillers, playing with them in a thoughtful and very entertaining way. The result is a group of intriguing protagonists who in isolation can hold their own in a busy storyline, yet interact and network with other characters in interesting ways.
The relationship between the two lead female protagonists has been well thought out. Hob is the tough guy of the two, Mags the gentler, more thoughtful and strategic (although put her back up against the wall and watch her come out fighting). My favourite is probably Ghost Wolves member, Coyote, a violent man with an intriguing past and rather gruesome dietary requirements, yet he is soon knocked into obedience by Hob through her sheer force of character and acerbic rhetoric.
Make no mistake this is an action-packed thriller, but it also explores (through the sci-fi/fantasy medium) issues of those who seek equality and justice from those who control in an impossible situation.

Blood Binds the Pack builds on everything that was brilliant in the previous book in this series, Hunger Makes The Wolf, and improves it on it. Hunger makes the Wolf showed us how our two primary protagonists, Hob and Mag, got into their positions in the Wolves gang and miners’ union respectively, here we see them more comfortable with that power, against a more purposeful and dangerous EvilCorp called TransRift. While on the surface this setup seems like a straightforward good plucky colonists versus bad evil corporation narrative, what I like most is that the book is both thematically and narratively afraid of ambiguity.

Where we were previously left in the dark about the nature of the Weathermen – TransRift’s genetically modified interstellar pilots/weather control magicians – Hob’s ally the Bone Collector, and the mineral unique to Tanegawa’s World that fascinates them both, in this book we’re given answers. But those answers are not complete, and lead to more questions in turn. The same is true about the nature of Hob, Mag, The Bone Collector, and Coyote’s ‘witchy’ powers: they’re there, we know how they got them, but we don’t know why they manifest the way that they do.

Similarly, we’re left with only a small window into how TransRift and the wider world work because only one major point of view character has any ongoing contact with that world. Our heroes are far from idiots, but they’re deliberately left by TransRift without much education or exposure to the news, and the narrative forces us into their level of understanding, which is an effective technique to get us to empathise with them. We never really get complete answers about what is going on and why, and I think the book is the better for it. It makes what is at one level very definitely a worldshaking narrative one which we see from street level rather than a bird’s eye view.

From a thematic perspective, there's clearly a big pro organised labour thrust to the narrative. There's no getting away from that and, indeed, unions around the world should be hawking this book like mad because I’ve never seen a more entertaining argument for the power of the union movement. But even within that pro-union bent there’s a lot of equivocation. The knowledge of when to stay strong, when to compromise, and how to bring together disparate interests that won’t always agree is shown to be a key to the success of Mag’s efforts at solidarity. It’s not just one big happy family, and I appreciate that even in the areas the author clearly holds strong views about, there’s a significant level of nuance, and little starry-eyed utopianism.

Finally, it’s important to note that the book is just a ridiculous amount of fun. The characters are compelling and vividly drawn – Hob and Mag as the two leads are brilliant, and the supporting narratives of Coyote and Shige play off each other very well – and the plot moves at a brisk but not overhurried pace towards an explosive conclusion. I mean, it’s biker witches and queer unionists in the SF wild west with a gay vampire and a weirdly sexy possibly alien as support cast members. It’s not possible for it to be anything but wildly entertaining. Creative, angry, and joyous in equal parts, I can’t wait to see what Wells serves up next.

I've been excited about reading this since I read the first book, Hunger Makes the Wolf, so it's safe to say I had very high expectations for it!

Well, I wasn't disappointed and I think I enjoyed this even more than the first book. It has so many good things about it I almost don't know where to start my review!

Hob has to be my favourite thing about the book. Her badass attitude and her witchy fire powers make her fun to read. Her ability to admit her own faults (especially her lack of education and emotional intelligence) and know where she is out of her depth and her confidence in leading and speaking out when she knows she is right makes her one of the most compelling female characters I've read.

I also love the genuine friendship between Hob and Mags. It's refreshing to see a female friendship like this in a book and it's nice that the author has just let it be and not added any strain or mistrust into it. It's also nice that it's not all one-sided as seems to be the case in a lot of books, where one character exists just to help and support the other. Mags and Hobs have a mutual respect / support relationship where they help and look out for each other.

Mags brings a serious side to the book, leading the workers fight against a company that thinks it owns them and is risking their lives to mine for the amirite. It balances out Hobs fun and all-out action and makes a story that has real depth and meaning to it.

The writing style is plain and simple and it really suits the style of the wild-west influenced setting. It's easy to read and easy to visualise and insanely readable, I was excited to get home each evening so I could sit down and start reading.

I think after the awesome buildup the ending let it down a little bit. I felt like a lot happened off page that I wanted to see. I wanted to know more about the world and the amirite and what's at the centre and it was a bit lacking in answers to that. But like I said I had very high expectations and this is the only fault I can find with the whole thing.

At the risk of sounding like I'm gushing, I properly loved this book! I'm hoping there will be another book in the series to pick up some of the loose ends, and because I'm simply not ready to be done with this world and these characters yet.

Blood Binds the Pack will take you on a high-octane ride across the sands of Tanegawa’s World with Hob's misfit band of mercenaries. It's a lot of fun to read and stands out as something a bit different. Recommended to anyone that likes sci-fi based future fun and action.